artist profile

Eugene Carchesio

born

1960

lives and works

Brisbane, Australia

about the artist

The art of Eugene Carchesio, one of the leading contemporary artists working in Australia today, finds weight in lightness, richness in simplicity, and eternity in the quotidian. Using his favored media of watercolor and pencil, he has produced a poetic collection of intimately rendered and delicately executed works. Subjects that take center stage on each sheet become oblique diary pages that document phases of his life: there might be shapes, such as the cone, the sphere, the cube, and others; or there might be objects, such as leaves, birds, skulls, or even boxers. His aesthetic is indelibly shaped by his deep love for and fervent interest in music, mathematics, and, more specifically, geometry. The artist offers moments of respite, windows of reverie, and passages returning to the fundamental in his pictures. Carchesio has exhibited widely in Australia and New Zealand; major surveys of his work include Someone’s Universe: The Art of Eugene Carchesio, at the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane, and everything takes time takes everything at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane. The artist represented Australia in the 10th Indian Triennale of Art held in New Delhi, India, in 2001, and was invited to participated in the 4th Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Brisbane, Australia, in 2003. International group exhibitions in which his work has been included have been staged at venues such as the Cartier Foundation in Paris, France; the Hallwalls Contemporary Art Centre in New York, USA; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul, South Korea; and City Gallery Wellington, New Zealand.